Quick Look preview of font files in Monterey 12.4

Claudio Piccinini

I finally purchased a new Mac, a Mac Studio with M1 Max processor, and I am still in the process of setting up all the software and moving the data from the old one. The machine came with Monterey 12.4 preinstalled.

After a few troubleshooting issues and known Monerey issues I was able to solve, I noticed that when you use "Quick Look" from the desktop, the preview on my monitor (which is an old Cinema Display) is larger, uglier and the letters look a lot less crisp, and darker, than how they looked when I was using the old Mac Pro tower from 2010 running 10.11.6.
I see that the situation is not better in Font Book (I started using it, previously I handled fonts installment manually), but I can’t tell if this was the same under 10.11.6.

I find this annoying, as it was very handy to have a crisp and clear rendering to compare the letters on the fly after generating a new OTF version, with small drawing corrections.
I wonder if this is a choice on Apple part, affecting representation on the older Apple monitors, and thus unsolvable.
Has anyone running Monterey experienced something similar?

P.S. It also occasionally cuts the preview of Italic fonts: very ugly (see attachment).

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Claudio Piccinini

This is FontLab way lighter (and crispier) preview for a comparision:

James Puckett

Apple got rid of subpixel aliasing with MacOS Monterey, that’s probably why things look so different. It will probably look better if you upgrade to a 4K or better display. 27" 5K displays are wonderful.

Claudio Piccinini

James Puckett said:

Apple got rid of subpixel aliasing with MacOS Monterey, that’s probably why things look so different. It will probably look better if you upgrade to a 4K or better display. 27" 5K displays are wonderful.

Thanks much James, this answers my question. That’s too bad… I would have purchased a new Apple Retina monitor, but I can’t spend right now.
I noticed that Fontlab 7 rendering was also a bit worse, but not bad as the Desktop Quick Look rendering… Oh well, for now I’m stuck with the old Cinema Display.

I still don’t understand the cursor in the Quick Look window, though, and the ugly rendering without any margin. I guess this wouldn’t change with a brand new Retina monitor anyway.

Thomas Phinney

It doesn’t have to be made by Apple! €350 will get you a decent 4K monitor. This one for example: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08MV7B7WF/

Florian Pircher

You can also try the Font Smoothing Adjuster app and setting Font smoothing to Disabled. It’s a super simple app and free to download from the web. Or, if you are comfortable with the command line, run:

defaults -currentHost write -g AppleFontSmoothing -int 0

as described on the website. I even have this option enabled for my retina display. You need to log out and back in for the setting to take effect.

Claudio Piccinini

Thomas Phinney said:

It doesn’t have to be made by Apple! €350 will get you a decent 4K monitor. This one for example: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08MV7B7WF/

Oh, thanks Thomas! That’s just that I am still quite fixated in having all of Apple original products — which might not be the best nowadays, given how "fashion driven" is their focus and marketing.

Claudio Piccinini

Florian Pircher said:

You can also try the Font Smoothing Adjuster app and setting Font smoothing to Disabled. It’s a super simple app and free to download from the web. Or, if you are comfortable with the command line, run:

defaults -currentHost write -g AppleFontSmoothing -int 0

as described on the website. I even have this option enabled for my retina display. You need to log out and back in for the setting to take effect.

Thanks much Florian! It seems to me that the "subpixel aliasing" mentioned by James gave better results, but at least disabling font smoothing makes the weight closer to the actual forms.

Thomas Phinney

(I do not mean to knock Apple monitors, btw. But if you are a type designer focused on text display more than color accuracy, you may have more cost-effective options.)